by AquaNerd | Mar 25, 2017 | Industry, Opinion, Science
Photo Credit: Reef Raft USA – Neptune Bounce Why are lineage corals so expensive? This is a question that I get asked once a week at New England Aquarium Services. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of lineage corals available in the aquarium trade and just one example of such a coral is the Jason Fox Beach Bum Montipora. This coral can range anywhere in price from $200-$600 for a ½ to 1 inch frag. The explanation for this question is very simple; lineage corals are corals that come from a seller’s private collection and they are unusually beautiful. Photo Credit: Jason Fox Signature Corals Additionally, corals like the Beach Bum usually command a higher price that holds up over time due to the fact that are by Admin | Mar 21, 2017 | Conservation, Opinion
The current best estimate of the amount of plastic trash in the marine environment stands at an astonishing 5.25 trillion pieces. Walk on a beach, just about anywhere, and you’ll come across plastic... by Saltwater Smarts | Feb 18, 2017 | Opinion, Tanks
E. ancora and close relatives can reach massive proportions in home aquaria Question Hi guys! My husband and I really enjoy your site and the commonsense advice you always give. My question for you is about the feasibility of adding an LPS coral to an established 60-gallon soft-coral tank. We’ve been keeping soft corals successfully for a long time, and now we’d like to give stony corals a try. We’re leaning toward an anchor coral because a friend of ours (who’s moving out of town and has to break down his tank) has a really nice specimen that he’s willing to give us. Most of the space in the tank is taken up by established colonies, but there is still one rock ledge available that we think should offer adequate room and good conditions for the new coral. The light (T5s) and current should be good in this location, and we’re pretty conscientious about water quality, always keeping nitrates very low by Saltwater Smarts | Feb 4, 2017 | Feeding, Fish, Opinion, Reef
Mandarin dragonet (Synchiropus splendidus) Hobby pioneer Paul “Paul B” Baldassano is not your grandfather’s reefkeeper (though he is old enough to be your grandfather!). Nor is his book, The Avant-Garde Marine Aquarist: A 60-Year History of Fishkeeping, anything like your grandfather’s hobby literature. In fact, Paul B’s perspective on just about any aspect of the marine aquarium hobby is quite distinct from anyone else’s. For proof that Paul has a decidedly different thought process, look no further than the following passage about mandarins and other dragonets from Chapter 7 of his book (which, by the way, would make a wonderful stocking stuffer for that slightly off-kilter hobbyist in your life):Mandarins and Other Dragonets Mandarinfish and all the other dragonets have the same problem—a tiny mouth and almost no stomach. Mandarins were designed to eat amphipods and copepods, or “pods” as we call them, but a mandarin will eat anything small that moves. I know many people try to “train” such a fish to eat pellets, potato chips, or frozen food, but dragonets hate you when you do that because all you are doing is slowly killing them. Because of their weird digestive tract, which is something like that of a seahorse, they don’t have the ability to store food—kind of like when people get that surgery where they put a band around the stomach so they can’t eat as much by Marcin Smok | Jan 27, 2017 | Aquaculture, Opinion, Tanks
If you thought that there was nothing left to be introduced to the synthetic salt mixes we all use in our reef aquariums, have we got some news for you! The Polish company Aquaforest has just proven this notion wrong with the introduction of its flagship salt mix,... by AquaNerd | Dec 13, 2016 | Corals, Eye Candy, Opinion
Do you have a Holy Grail coral? AKA, a nub of something exotic that you have to have? Well, I can tell you that I have plenty of those on my wish list. Sometimes I actually get a chance to acquire that Holy Grail coral at a price that I am willing to pay. The Darth Maul Porites (po-rite-ees) is one such coral for me. While browsing forums, I came across a lovely ruby colored SPS that was called the Darth Maul Porites. Hobbyists were trying different lighting intensities and spectrums in an effort to get their frags to maintain the jewel tone that it is known for. We see many green and blue corals in the hobby, but a red, pink, yellow or orange
